Matthew Townend - Director, Writer
 After accidentally auditioning for a professional pantomime
when he was thirteen, Matt discovered his love of all things theatre. He
subsequently joined the National Youth Theatre and since then has been
involved in every production he could get his grubby little paws on. He has
performed in numerous shows over the years, including the musicals Oliver,
Smike, South Pacific, Greece, Cabaret, Crazy
for You, Sweet Charity and Singing in the Rain and
productions as varied as The Roses of Eyam, The Taming of the
Shrew (Gremio), Macbeth (Duncan), The Thwarting of Baron
Bolligrew (Bolligrew) and Equus (Alan). He has also performed a
number of duologue competitions (which often involved writing adaptations of
screenplays or existing scripts); these included an original ode to the Marx
Brothers, Schindler’s List, Reservoir Dogs and Waiting for Godot. It was during the University of Exeter Footlights’ production of Singing in the Rain that Matt met David Massingham and the idea for a comedic musical about the bubonic plague was spawned. Matt directed a University Theatre Company production of Our Country’s Good, in which David played the part of Sideway, and work on Plague! The Musical began in earnest. In 2005 Matt retuned to Pantomime with the Bodicote Players, performing in Red Riding Hood. In 2006 he wrote and directed the highly successful Pirates in Petticoats for the same company, and the pantomime is now being considered for publication. Matt’s parents, Mike and Gill Townend, are conveniently musical arrangers and have been working on orchestrating the songs for Plague! The musical has thus become something of a family industry for the Townends. Matt currently works in Hertfordshire as an English and Drama teacher at Merchant Taylors’ School for Boys and is directing a production of Hamlet for the lower school. |